[Rockhounds] Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology

[Tim Fisher]

Glad you said it and not me, now they're on the hunt for you. You will be
assimilated! Cubic or not! :D

Tim Fisher
Http://OreRockOn.com 
Email nospam at orerockon.com


 -----Original Message-----
From: Rockhounds [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com] On
Behalf Of Alan Goldstein
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2020 11:38 AM
To: Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors
Subject: Re: [Rockhounds] Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of
Geology

It's (obviously) the Borg!

Alan G.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 20, 2020, at 8:59 AM, Kreigh Tomaszewski <kreigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> n a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos 
> <http://bagira.iit.bme.hu/~domokos/> arrived on the geophysicist 
> Douglas Jerolmack 
> <https://earth.sas.upenn.edu/people/douglas-j-jerolmack>’s
> doorstep in Philadelphia. Domokos carried with him his suitcases, a 
> bad cold and a burning secret.
> 
> The two men walked across a gravel lot behind the house, where 
> Jerolmack’s wife ran a taco cart. Their feet crunched over crushed 
> limestone. Domokos pointed down.
> 
> “How many facets do each of these gravel pieces have?” he said. Then 
> he grinned. “What if I told you that the number was always somewhere 
> around six?” Then he asked a bigger question, one that he hoped would 
> worm its way into his colleague’s brain. What if the world is made of
cubes?
> 
> At first, Jerolmack objected. Houses can be built out of bricks, but 
> Earth is made of rocks. Obviously, rocks vary. Mica flakes into 
> sheets; crystals crack on sharply defined axes. But from mathematics 
> alone, Domokos argued, any rocks that broke randomly would crack into 
> shapes that have, on average, six faces and eight vertices. Considered 
> together, they would all be shadowy approximations converging on a 
> sort of ideal cube. Domokos had proved it mathematically, he said. Now 
> he needed Jerolmack’s help to show that this is what nature does.
> 
> “It was geometry with an exact prediction that was borne out in the 
> natural world, with essentially no physics involved,” said Jerolmack, 
> a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “How in the hell does 
> nature let this happen?”
>